RETRO ACTIVE: Hercules in the Haunted World (1961)
by Nick Schager 
What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today?s new releases. In honor of the swords-and-sandals epic Immortals, this week it's Mario Bava's nightmarish 1961 Hercules in the Haunted World. Mario Bava's cinema immerses one in the otherworldly, so it's fitting that
Hercules in the Haunted World, the legendary horror maestro's contribution to the
'60s-'70s Greek mythology subgenre, opens with a credit sequence boasting a blood-red spiral into which the viewer seemingly plummets. His maiden effort in color, and produced a year after his iconic
Black Sunday, Bava's 1961 film is narratively goofy but aesthetically rapturous, delivering myriad magnificent spectacles and an enveloping supernatural atmosphere that speak to Bava's preoccupation with the untrustworthiness of sensory experience and the tenuousness of reality. Shot with a minimal budget that Bava maximized through clever re-use of sets and props (as elucidated by Tim Lucas' excellent liner notes to the 2002 Fantoma DVD release), the director's saga is a thing of misty monstrousness and blood-red beauty. Awash in lurid hues and a smoky haze that lend ominous splendor to its action, his tale is one of loyalty, sacrifice and the dangerous allure of illusions, themes addressed through the efforts of Hercules (two-time Mr. Olympia
Reg Park) to travel to Hades to recover the magical Stone of Forgetfulness in order to revive his entranced love Deianira (
Leonora Ruffo), who has fallen under the spell of her uncle, newly self-crowned King Lico (
Christopher Lee).
Accompanied by his ladies-man comrade Theseus (
George Ardisson) and insufferable buffoon Telemachus (
Franco Giacobini), Hercules sets about his task after consulting a masked oracle sitting cross-legged in a dark, empty room whom Bava shoots from behind glittering jewels. His first stop is the Land of the Hesperides, where he must obtain a golden apple that will grant him entrance to the underworld. Sailing there through a crimson night shrouded in inky shadows that herald a storm that runs their vessel aground, Hercules and company awaken in Hesperides, the first of many moments that posit their quest as, if not an actual dream, than at least fundamentally dreamlike. That mood continues throughout
Hercules in the Haunted World, and not simply because the script is a confused muddle of abrupt character behavior and nonsensical plotting. As when the camera zooms into the foggy cavern that leads to Hades and the filmmaker employs a beautiful dissolve to segue to Hercules and Theseus making their way through a red cavern passageway, Bava's direction imbues what is often silly material with a hallucinatory quality, regularly creating a sense of descending into irrationality through evocative widescreen framing and entrancing editorial transitions.
Bava's action set pieces are a bland, conceptually one-note lot, as
Hercules in the Haunted World's signature feats-of-strength incidents all feature Hercules triumphing by tossing some sort of enormous stone?twice it's a boulder tethered to a rope or vine, and during the climax, it's a series of towering pillars. The end result of this recurring motif is unintentional comedy, a situation not aided by performances that are either wooden to the point of petrification (see: every female cast member) or hyperactive to the point of aggravation, with the exception of Park (who proves a passable Herc, if not in
Steve Reeves' class) and Lee. The latter exudes his usual towering spawn-of-Satan malevolence, which is all the more admirable for the fact that his dialogue is dubbed by another actor, thereby depriving the film of its most charismatic star?s inimitable baritone. Still, Lee isn't given much to do other than stalk the beatific blonde Deianira around an underground lair that, with its pagan decorations and spooky coffins (including one from which Deianira initially rises), recalls similar locations in
Black Sunday.
Despite its considerable shortcomings in the plot and acting departments,
Hercules in the Haunted World nonetheless serves up a raft of memorable mythological moments, from Hercules and Theseus traversing a demon-lava canyon via rope?the two dwarfed by towering mountains and whipped by wind in wide shots, before one of them falls and sinks into the bubbling, steaming sludge below?to a final skirmish in which Hercules is attacked by an army of soaring, clawing specters that culminates with a striking shot of a skeletal hand protruding from between two granite slabs. So arresting are these visions that they largely obscure the pointlessness of the haphazard story's ins and outs involving the playboy Theseus' foolhardy relationship with Persephone and the resultant wrath wreaked on Earth by her angry (and never-seen) father Pluto. Moreover, even in that perfunctory doomed-romance dynamic, Bava captures a sense of images (be they of a beloved paramour, or a seemingly bottomless chasm) as powerful and potentially illusory?a notion that?s subtly, and evocatively, conveyed by his film?s bounty of unforgettably unreal sights.
Posted by ahillis at November 8, 2011 9:51 AM
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